Jody Freeman

President Biden has signed more executive orders in his first weeks than any president since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, and many of those orders focus on protecting the environment and fighting against climate change. Jody Freeman, professor at Harvard Law School and former Counselor for Energy and Climate Change in the Obama White House, joins Host Bobby Bascomb to dive deeper into how these actions lay the groundwork for strong climate policy and green investment.

An op-ed by Jody Freeman: General Motors’ announcement last week that it will stop making gas-powered cars, trucks and sport utility vehicles by 2035 and become carbon neutral by 2040 is even bolder than it sounds: The repercussions will ripple broadly across the economy, accelerating the transition to a broader electric future powered by renewable energy. The pledge by the nation’s largest automaker to phase out internal combustion engines puts pressure on other auto companies, like Ford and Toyota, to make equally ambitious public commitments. It follows an earlier announcement by G.M. that it would invest $27 billion in electric vehicles over the next five years. While every major auto company is investing in zero- and low-emission vehicles, amounting to $257 billion worldwide through 2030, until now none had been willing to say when they would end production of gas-powered cars. Wall Street rewarded G.M.’s clarity by bumping its stock. Now investors will expect the rest of the industry to explain how their electric vehicle strategies measure up. G.M.’s decision is a sea change. For decades, the company and other automakers resisted pollution rules. As recently as last year, G.M. supported the Trump administration’s relaxation of fuel efficiency standards, only to make an about-face after the November election. When one of the most recalcitrant and iconic American companies so markedly changes its tune and embraces the clean-energy transition, something big is happening. Pressure will undoubtedly mount on oil and gas companies, among others, to produce credible energy transition plans of their own.

Opponents of President Trump's climate rule rollbacks rejoiced yesterday after a federal appeals court gave the Biden administration a clean slate to craft a new rule to control greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit tossed out the Trump EPA's Affordable Clean Energy rule and sent it back to the agency. The court found EPA had too narrowly interpreted its authority to regulate emissions. The court not only gave the green light for President-elect Joe Biden to draft stronger power plant regulations, but also broadly affirmed EPA's authority to craft climate regulations for a range of emissions sources...Asked for a comment on yesterday's court decision, Joseph Goffman, who played a key role in crafting the Clean Power Plan and is part of the EPA transition team for the incoming Biden administration, sent E+E News a link to a recording by the Royal Choral Society of the "Hallelujah" chorus from George Frideric Handel's "Messiah." "Feel free to quote me," he said...EPA took that more challenging legal approach by arguing that the statute was unambiguous in supporting its position. The agency could have instead said it was using its discretion to interpret the law, said Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University. Looking from the outside, it seemed like the best explanation for why Trump's EPA took that position was so that it could block future administrations from "doing anything meaningful" on climate regulation, Freeman said. "It seems like a deep ideological commitment but not the best legal strategy," she said.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down the Trump administration’s plan to relax restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, paving the way for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to enact new and stronger restrictions on power plants...Environmental groups and legal experts saw the decision as a vindication of the argument that the government does have the authority to tackle climate change. “It’s a massive win,” said Jody Freeman, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University who served as a legal counsel in the Obama administration. A core promise of the Biden campaign was to eliminate fossil fuel emissions from the power sector by 2035. With Tuesday’s ruling, the Biden administration will not have to wait for the legal fight over the Trump rule to play out before deciding whether or how to use regulation to tackle climate change, Ms. Freeman said. Instead, she said, the Biden E.P.A. can “go on the offense” immediately. “The real win here is that the Trump administration failed to tie the Biden team’s hands,” Ms. Freeman said. “They wanted to lock in a narrow legal interpretation and make it impossible for a new administration to set ambitious standards for power plants. That was their whole strategy. And it went down to spectacular defeat.”

For four years, President Donald Trump has careened from one crisis to the next, many of his own making. Still, through the Mueller investigation, two impeachments, the deadliest pandemic in a century, and even a failed and dangerous attempt to overturn his own election defeat, Trump and his administration remained steadfast in at least one quest: to weaken many of the country's bedrock climate and environmental guardrails. Considered in the course of humanity -- or the 4.5-billion-year history of this planet -- a single presidential term is barely a blink of an eye. But in just four years, Trump has cemented a legacy -- particularly on climate change -- that will be felt by generations to come...President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to rejoin the Paris Agreement on Day One of his presidency, but experts say repairing the damage to the country's international standing that was done by Trump abandoning the accord will not be easy. "In one sense, it's easy for President Biden to announce on the first day he's in office that the US will rejoin," said Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor who served as counselor for energy and climate change in the White House under President Barack Obama. "The hard part is to put together an ambitious, credible pledge for what the US is prepared to do to meet their Paris Agreement commitments."

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has selected Michael S. Regan, North Carolina’s top environmental regulator, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Biden’s transition team announced Thursday. The decision elevates for the first time a Black man to lead the powerful department, which is central to achieving the new administration’s climate change agenda. Mr. Regan was not the president-elect’s first choice, and he lacks some of the political star power of Mr. Biden’s other cabinet picks. But he will be on the front lines of the incoming administration’s effort to undo one of President Trump’s most sprawling transformations of the federal government: the unraveling of a half-century of pollution and climate regulations, and the diminishment of the science that underpinned them. “He faces a massive reconstruction and rebuilding operation,” said Jody Freeman, a Harvard University law professor who served as White House counselor for energy and climate change in the Obama administration. Mr. Regan “has to go in and restore the morale of the career staff,” she said. “He has to make it clear that science and integrity are back. He’s got a raft of rules that he’s got to rescind and replace and strengthen.” And, Ms. Freeman added, “He’s got to do this under some time pressure.”

Environmentalists and climate change activists are expressing a feeling this week that's been hard for them to come by in the past four years: optimism. The names of President-elect Joe Biden's key cabinet members who will deal with the issue he's called an "existential threat" emerged this week, and while the behind-the-scenes lobbying for the positions may have been fierce, the prospective team is being hailed as a group of climate all-stars...Many greens were skeptical that Biden was devoted to the climate cause when he emerged as the nominee from the Democratic primary. His climate plan at the time got lukewarm reviews from them, but a mid-year melding of the minds with Sen. Bernie Sanders team and other activists such as Sunrise Movement and alumni of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee's brief presidential bid produced the most aggressive-ever blueprint ever from a party's nominee: $2 trillion in climate spending in four years to set the power grid on a path to clean energy by 2035 and net-zero emissions for the whole country by 2050. Those goals, scientists say, are crucial to reach to stave off catastrophic climate change in the coming decades. But even with the promise, many experts were nervous that Biden's team may not live up to expectations. Now, those fears have disappeared. “It’s hard not to be impressed and even inspired,” said Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program and a former Obama White House adviser...Even if the Senate remains under Republican control after next month's Georgia run-off election, Biden backers are confident the team will make major strides wielding their executive branch power. "It’s the Cabinet officials who have the legal authority," Freeman said. "But what they can use is some help getting policies through a fairly bureaucratic White House. If you order this the right way, you can have a lot of success.”

President-elect Joe Biden has picked superstars to advance his global warming agenda. The expected appointment this week of former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to oversee Biden's domestic climate policy comes after he tapped former Democratic presidential nominee and Secretary of State John Kerry to represent his climate priorities abroad. McCarthy, who comes fresh from leading the influential Natural Resources Defense Council, can claim a leading role in every EPA rule promulgated under President Obama to combat climate change — first as the agency's air chief and then its leader. Kerry led the U.S. effort to land the Paris Agreement... "I see the McCarthy pick, in particular, as a recognition that the playbook is a regulatory playbook," said Jody Freeman, an Obama administration adviser who now directs the Environment and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. "I think there's going to be a lot of emphasis on regulation, especially early on right out of the gate," she said. "EPA has a bunch of rules it has to put back in place, and she knows exactly what that's like." But Freeman and others say that far from overshadowing an EPA administrator, McCarthy would likely use her expertise to be EPA's top advocate in the White House, smoothing the way for regulations written by agency experts. Freeman envisioned McCarthy as a kind of climate change quarterback at the White House who could overcome challenges that might complicate rulemakings or water down their results.

When President-elect Joe Biden takes office, Harvard law professor Jody Freeman says he’ll have “an awful lot of authority” with the EPA and other agencies. Despite Republican power in Congress, executive clout can get the U.S. “back on a path of dealing with climate change” by shoring up environmental protections unraveled by President Trump. As Biden’s new Climate Tsar, John Kerry can restore America’s role in the Paris Agreement, which he helped draft as President Obama’s Secretary of State.  Princeton international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer concedes that Biden’s goal of “net zero” by 2050 doesn’t mean eliminating fossil fuels, even though that’s what it sounds like. But he and Freeman say it’ll do some good, despite “honestly motivated” criticism from climate advocates. Later on, when it comes to Trump’s famous big lie that Joe Biden stole the presidential election, Brown University politics professor Corey Brettschneider says, “I think it is extremely dangerous for a sitting president to try to undermine faith in our elections, when there's no evidence that there was any fraud.” He says U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is part of a team with Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch that threaten Roe v. Wade, gay marriage, and the Biden White House.

President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency was rushing to complete one of its last regulatory priorities, aiming to obstruct the creation of air- and water-pollution controls far into the future, when a senior career scientist moved to hobble it. Thomas Sinks directed the E.P.A.’s science advisory office and later managed the agency’s rules and data around research that involved people. Before his retirement in September, he decided to issue a blistering official opinion that the pending rule — which would require the agency to ignore or downgrade any medical research that does not expose its raw data — will compromise American public health...Last month, the agency finalized a rule that creates a lengthy new legal process to overturn or withdraw certain policy directives known as “guidance documents,” which give federal agencies direction on the specifics of how to enforce laws. Such guidance documents can give an administration some license to interpret laws in ways that advance their policy agenda. For example, the E.P.A. during the Trump administration has published a guidance document that allows oil and gas companies to release flares from their wells for up to 15 minutes at a time before regulations apply — a process that releases methane, a powerful planet-warming greenhouse gas...Jody Freeman, a professor of environmental law at Harvard and a former adviser to the Obama administration, called the rule a “little I.E.D.,” referring to an improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb, aimed at slowing a Biden administration’s plans to overturn Mr. Trump’s rules. “Shenanigans like these are what awaits the Biden team,” she said.

The Trump administration rolled back over 125 environmental rules during their tenure. These policies protected wildlife and water, and regulated chemicals and greenhouse gases. This hour, we’ll discuss Trump’s environmental and climate legacy. We’ll also look at President-elect Biden’s climate plans and discuss what actions he can take (with or without a democratic Senate) to protect the environment, address our energy needs, and tackle global warming. Joining us are Michael Mann, professor and director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, and Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University.

Climate activists have set a high bar for President-elect Joe Biden's staff picks, asking that he exclude anyone with ties to fossil fuel industries. They've already been disappointed. Biden faced backlash this week after naming Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond to lead the Office of Public Engagement. Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said it "feels like a betrayal" because Richmond "has taken more donations from the fossil fuel industry during his Congressional career than nearly any other Democrat." The oil and gas industry has been among Richmond's top campaign contributors over his career in Congress, according to Center for Responsive Politics...Among the names on the Biden transition's agency review teams a few have limited ties to fossil fuel, but more are from environmental groups. "When I look at that list I think the clear message is the Biden team wants good people in place, right from the start, who have experience in these agencies and are not wasting any time," says Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. She was a former counselor on energy and climate change in the Obama White House. Freeman is a good example of those who could be excluded if a Biden administration rejected people connected to fossil fuel companies. She sits on the board of oil company Conoco-Phillips, but she also led Obama's effort to double car fuel-efficiency standards. Freeman is also an expert on using presidential powers to address climate change, knowledge that likely will be necessary if both parties can't agree on new climate legislation when Biden is sworn in next year.

What can President-Elect Biden do to reverse course on the environment and climate change? What can he accomplish with a Republican-controlled US Senate, pending results of two runoff elections in Georgia? What can he pursue in the executive branch? And how will the left wing of the Democratic Party play into his plans? For our podcast, Trump on Earth, Reid Frazier unpacks all of this with Jody Freeman, law professor and director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. Before that she worked for the Obama EPA, where she helped write fuel efficiency regulations for cars, which were later rolled back under President Trump.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will use the next four years to try to restore the environmental policies that his predecessor has methodically blown up, but the damage done by the greenhouse gas pollution unleashed by President Trump’s rollbacks may prove to be one of the most profound legacies of his single term. Most of Mr. Trump’s environmental policies, which erased or loosened nearly 100 rules and regulations on pollution in the air, water and atmosphere, can be reversed, though not immediately. Pollutants like industrial soot and chemicals can have lasting health effects, especially in minority communities where they are often concentrated. But air quality and water clarity can be restored once emissions are put back under control. That is not true for the global climate. Greenhouse pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, so the heat-trapping gases emitted as a result of loosened regulations will remain for decades, regardless of changes in policy. “Historically, there is always a pendulum to swing back and forth between Democratic and Republican administrations on the environment, and, theoretically, the environment can recover,” said Jody Freeman, a professor of environmental law at Harvard and a former adviser to the Obama administration. “You can put rules back in place that clean up the air and water. But climate change doesn’t work like that.” Moreover, Mr. Trump’s rollbacks of emissions policies have come at a critical moment: Over the past four years, the global level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere crossed a long-feared threshold of atmospheric concentration. Now, many of the most damaging effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, deadlier storms, and more devastating heat, droughts and wildfires, are irreversible.

The EPA and Interior Department under President-elect Joe Biden will have a range of tools at their disposal to start undoing President Donald Trump’s deregulatory agenda on the environment, according to former agency officials, lawyers, and environmentalists. Many of the administration’s more ambitious environmental goals, such as reviving regulations on climate pollutants from power plants and automobiles, will take longer to change or put into place. But most observers expect Biden’s team to get working immediately after inauguration on smaller measures, such as the “secret science” rule that would block the EPA from using scientific research that isn’t or can’t be made public. “They’ll be starting right out of the gate,” predicted Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. But some who support Trump’s rollbacks warn that Biden will pay for being too ambitious in efforts to reverse them... One of the fastest and easiest actions the environmental agencies can take is to strike down Trump-era guidance that the Biden team disagrees with, said Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice. “That can be done with the stroke of a pen,” Sankar said. Dozens of such guidance documents are now on the books. Among the candidates for immediate rescission is an October memo from the Environmental Protection Agency, arguing that the Clean Air Act gives states flexibility to administer air pollution requirements and saying some exemptions are appropriate, Sankar said.

An article by Jody Freeman: Amy Coney Barrett’s likely confirmation to the Supreme Court to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a Monday Senate vote will add a conservative sixth vote to an already-conservative majority, with potentially far-reaching implications for American law. Barrett’s confirmation will scramble the current distribution of power on the Court, displacing the chief justice as its putative center and pulling it rightward. Most legal commentators expect that Barrett’s judicial philosophy of originalism and her advocacy of a more “flexible” approach to precedent will make her more likely to vote to overturn precedents like Roe v. Wade. Barrett also believes that judges should interpret statutes in accord with their “original public meaning,” a strict brand of textualism that tends to constrain agency regulatory power. What can we predict about Barrett’s likely attitude toward environmental regulation, and climate change in particular? Would she vote to overturn Massachusetts v. EPA, the Court’s 2007 landmark holding that the Environmental Protection Agency may regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act? Would she vote to uphold the Trump administration’s rescission of the Obama-era greenhouse gas standards for the power sector, and its ambitious greenhouse gas and fuel efficiency standards for cars, and uphold the administration’s far weaker rules? What of the administration’s legal theory that when setting power plant standards, EPA cannot consider grid-wide strategies like substituting natural gas for coal, even though Congress told the agency to use the “best system” of emission reduction? Or the administration’s theory that federal law preempts California from setting its own vehicle greenhouse gas standards, and, separately, that EPA can revoke California’s current waiver to set those standards? Would it be more difficult for a new Biden administration to adopt ambitious greenhouse gas rules with Barrett on the Court?

Even as California aspires to a more sustainable, climate-friendly economy, the environmental degradation Bahram Fazeli witnesses daily is an unwelcome reminder of how much the state is held back by a federal government pushing in the other direction. The oil wells, refineries, metal-finishing businesses and hazardous waste facilities in Wilmington and Huntington Park, where the environmental activist works, leave residents of those primarily Latino communities acutely exposed to health risks. Fazeli has lost patience with the pace of change...That urgency gives the state a particularly large stake in the outcome of an election that poses a drastic contrast on climate issues — a White House steeped in climate denial and closely allied with fossil fuel companies versus a Democratic candidate who has embraced a $2-trillion climate plan that would rely heavily on California innovation and ambition as a template for fighting global warming across the country. The Trump administration has spent billions of dollars in an almost entirely unsuccessful effort to prop up the nation’s coal industry and has given priority to coal and oil production over renewable sources. The administration’s policies have put the economic interests of regions heavily dependent on coal and oil production ahead of states like California. Biden would largely reverse that. California’s senior elected officials — all Democrats — believe Biden’s election would unleash a flurry of initiatives in the state designed to reshape the energy and transportation sectors and shift money to low-income communities suffering the most from pollution caused by fossil fuels. “It would be going from pushing a rock up a mountain to running downhill with the wind at your back,” said Jody Freeman, who was President Obama’s advisor on climate change and now directs the environmental law program at Harvard.

In this episode—the second in our ongoing “Big Decisions” spin-off series—guest host and chair of the RFF Board of Directors Sue Tierney talks with Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, and Jeffrey Holmstead, a former assistant administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Both guests this week reflect on their experiences working on environmental policy during the hectic early years of a new presidential administration and discuss upcoming challenges for either a Biden presidency or another Trump term as the pandemic persists, global economic woes continue, and climate change intensifies. While Freeman has concerns that confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court could reduce the authority of environmental regulators, Holmstead contends that the court’s conservative turn could be an opportunity for Congress to take the lead in pursuing ambitious energy legislation again.